My social media feed brought to mind a half-forgotten influencer, the late Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, a broadcaster, author and war correspondent, born in Swansea in August 1908.
He was educated at Swansea Grammar School, where he was taught English by Dylan Thomas’s father. He subsequently earned a degree in history from Cambridge University and later had a long and influential career in radio and television.
He may have had his own window on Welsh history; his family is reputed to have had links to the Rebecca Riots in Pontarddulais.
As fate would have it, I found that his ‘Wales: A History (The Story of Wales Book 1)’ was due to be released in Kindle format on 24 August. I placed my order.
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas: poetry amid the gunfire
During World War II, Vaughan-Thomas, like HE Bates, of whom more below, reported from the RAF – remarkably, he once flew along on a bombing mission over Germany, observing the destruction unfold below “Berlin burning, seen from 19,000 ft, was the most beautifully horrible sight I’ve ever seen” – from the cockpit of a Lancaster, part journalism, part poetry, with the same knack for paradox as Dylan Thomas’s ‘an ugly, lovely town’.
I have two personal recollections of Vaughan-Thomas that capture his essence for me. The first is a short TV programme in which our intrepid reporter tried his hand at caving and discovered, to his evidently pained surprise, that the thermal properties of a wetsuit begin with the ingress of very cold water.
The second memory – and I cannot now remember whether I first read, saw or heard it – relates to his time as a BBC reporter attached to the Allied forces during the Anzio beachhead landings in Italy in WWII.
At the beachhead, Vaughan-Thomas was intrigued to learn that a nightingale often sang near the front line. Further investigation suggested the bird sang only in response to gunfire. To prompt it, the Allies opened fire; the enemy responded, and the birdsong began.
Based on the few details available at the time, I formed my own mental image of a young Welsh reporter lying deep in a foxhole, chuckling at the absurd – munitions and melody, plaintive birdsong woven through the raging gunfire overhead.
It was an act of wild, reckless frontline reporting, an attempt to capture delicate birdsong, an insane attempt to capture some semblance of sanity amidst the grim, violent backdrop of war.
Alistair Cooke: letters across the Atlantic
Alistair Cooke was a contemporary, also born in 1908. His ‘Letter from America’ was a weekly 15-minute BBC radio broadcast that ran for 58 years, from March 1946 to February 2004. The series ran for 2,869 broadcasts. Letter from America covered 11 US presidents, from Harry Truman (president 33) to George W. Bush (president 43), during global and US events, including the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the aftermath of 9/11. What Cooke might have made of president 45 and 47 remains a matter of conjecture.
In 1920, an American journalist and satirist, HL Mencken, during a presidential campaign, commented:
“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
As much an observation on a flaw of democracy and populism, rather than its application to any particular leader, however appropriate: people can be swept along by a populist, charismatic figure, only for their true suitability to become clear once they’re already in power.
We have had one such failed experiment in the UK; surely to elect another, more unpleasant populist politician to the office of PM is unthinkable?
A collection of Cooke’s gentle, humane broadcasts is available as an audiobook.
Of particular interest to me was Cooke’s take on the Second Amendment broadcast in October 1993. In it, he argued that the Founding Fathers had drafted the amendment to the Constitution at a time when the United States had no standing army, and that it had been intended for armed citizens to form “A well regulated Militia” to prevent the rise of standing armies, which could possibly be commandeered by future monarchs or dictators.
Rather than a right to bear arms for personal protection, it could be seen as a civic duty in the face of potential external or internal threats.
Cooke was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) in 1973 for his outstanding contribution to Anglo-American understanding. A far cry from the current litigation brought by POTUS 47 against the BBC.
Flying Officer X: words forged in wartime skies
Flying Officer X was the pen name assumed by the quintessentially English writer HE Bates, who had been commissioned by the Royal Air Force to write about his World War II experiences when he was attached to active airfields.
The Flying Officer X collected stories featured real pilots from across the Commonwealth and Europe.
I found the story ‘The Young Man from Kalgoorlie’ particularly interesting, as I spent a couple of years in that gold-mining town and the surrounding areas. The young man in question is referred to as Albert, a sheep farmer from a property northwest of Kalgoorlie, whose parents had kept the news of the outbreak of WWII from him for a year. I was quite prepared to accept this possibility, as I have several gaps in my memory of world events and popular music from my time on the Goldfields in the early 1970s.
Arising from experiences gained during his time attached to the RAF, but not included in the Flying Officer X collected stories, was Bates’s poem ‘Give Them Their Life’ – a wonderful evocation of letting go, perhaps the most difficult duty of any parent, of youthful ideals and their sad erosion amid the grim reality of war. Part of it reads:
Give them their wings:
They cannot fly too high or far
To fly above
The dirty-moted, bomb-soured, word-tired world.
And if they die, they’ll die,
As you should know,
More swiftly, cleanly, star-defined, than you will ever feel.
More from Paul Bright
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